Wednesday 25 April 2012 11.47 EDT
First published on Wednesday 25 April 2012 11.47 EDT

Calling David Cameron a moron is a talking point. And I suppose that is what Business Insider, the US news website, wanted when it reported the prime minister's comments at Question Time as representing "the height of idiocy".

Staff writer Joe Weisenthal, choking on his morning muesli, accused Cameron of sounding like a moron when he said Britain's low interest rates demonstrate it has credibility.

"OMG! Your economy is going into a double-dip recession! That's why your government borrowing rates are plunging. It's got nothing to do with 'credibility'. It's the fact that when your economy is going down the tubes, there's nothing appealing to invest in, and so they just park their cash in risk-free government debt," he wrote on Wednesday afternoon after Cameron was mauled by opposition MPs over the economy and the Leveson inquiry.

"Low rates in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan, are the surest signals of long-term decline. What on earth are you bragging about?," he added.

Weisenthal's point is that repeating the austerity mantra has "rotted the minds of leaders" across the eurozone and rightwingers in the US.

Investors would prefer to put their money into the private sector where the potential for growth is higher. But in a mixed portfolio of investments, better to put that money into Indonesian logging companies and keep rainy day cash in the European Central Bank, or its satellite ministries across the eurozone.

Of course, everyone talks up the need for a growth strategy these days when in 2010 it was just austerity. But the talk is just that. There is no action. With one set of economists telling policymakers that the public sector needs to maintain investment to spur the private sector, while an opposing camp says the private sector will sit on its hands until the public sector is properly constrained, we have only paralysis.